For teachers, the 2016 presidential election a gift and a curse

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Oakland High School senior Leslie Ramos, right, pulls up a map of the United States that shows how states are polling in the presidential race as she works with fellow student Kelvin Lockett as part of a project in Jesse Shapiro’s U.S. Government class in Oakland, Calif., on Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016. Shapiro is having his students create news channel type videos as they study the 2016 presidential race. (Kristopher Skinner/Bay Area News Group)

In the past decade of teaching high school history and government, Geoff Beckstrom has to admit that he has never taught during a presidential election season quite like this one.

The scandal, bombast, and crude language that at times have energized this year’s presidential election has been a high school history teacher’s gift — and curse.

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“There’s been plenty of outrageous accusations that the seniors can really sink their teeth into, and they are getting fired up about someone getting burned on the internet,” said Beckstrom, who has taught history for 10 years at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale. “But it’s a two-edged sword, because while they are getting more engaged in the race, the whole question now becomes how do we teach the election in a way that de-escalates the rhetoric and Twitter burn?”

That conundrum has left some educators and parents scratching their heads over how to navigate the fine line between using the presidential electionas a real-time civics lesson about American democracy andstill not get mired in the more lewd and odious aspects of it.

Tara Fikrat, a Muslim-American parent, says she worried about what some of campaign’s misogynistic and anti-immigrant overtones are ultimately teaching her son, who attends Walnut Creek Intermediate.

“Because of the vitriol that’s been covered in this election, for the first time I’m turning off the news because I don’t want this year’s election to be seen for my son as a lesson in dirty cowboys,” she said. “He’s 12 and he’s impressionable … it’s dulling out our sense of propriety. I think it tears away at everything that our mothers taught us, and everything we teach about good manners to our kids is being chipped away at.”

Oakland High School classmates Kelvin Lockett, 17, and Leslie Ramos, 18, say that it’s amazing to them what’s become the norm in this election.

“I feel like the discussions we have in the class are way more grown-up,” Ramos said of the debates and news of the race.

“And they’re supposed to be the grownups, not us,” Lockett exclaimed with disbelief.

Their government teacher, Jesse Shapiro, said that although this election is “a lot smuttier and mudslinging than previous elections, for me, it doesn’t change how I teach it.”

He starts with having students take a survey that allows them to plot their beliefs on the political spectrum. Then he talks about the importance of swing voters — soccer moms, evangelical Christians, blue-collar workers and the elderly — in tightly contested states such as Ohio and Florida. And inflammatory language by the candidatesaside, he teaches kids how to cultivate a critical eye toward ads to assess which group of voters each camp is targeting.

“My job is to contextualize the mudslinging and help them to see that the candidates are doing it with intent and have swing voters in mind,” he said.

In some cases, more conservative students are feeling less free to speak out, since they don’t want to be associated with some of nastier aspects of the campaign and most of their peers are left-leaning, said Beckstrom. He’ll sometimes play devil’s advocate so it’s not a one-sided debate. In results released Wednesday from a student mock election, which included 16,000 schools nationwide and more 750 schools in the Bay Area, Hillary Clinton received57 percent of the national vote, with 32 percent for Donald Trump. But in the Bay Area, Clinton won the student vote with more dramatic margins: in Alameda County, with 82 percent, and about 78 percent in Contra Costa, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. Third-party candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson received smaller percentages of the students’ votes.

But most students are casting their vote “against a candidate, rather than for” a candidate, said Brian Ladd, a civics and economics teacher at Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton.

Shapiro, for one, doesn’t tiptoe around the harsh language and issues that have come up around the treatment ofwomen, allegations of sexual assault and immigration reform, in his class of seniors.

“They’re 17- and 18-year-olds in Oakland, and I grew up here, too,” he said. “So I’m not going to pull any punches, and the language, whatever it is; that’s the least of the concerns.”

But for elementary teachers, it can be a challenge sometimes to skirt around the less child-friendly, age-inappropriate election fodder. A number of her fellow teachers have shied away from asking their students to watch the debates, uncertain of what Pandora’s box might be opened as a result, said Jennifer Aza Allan, a fifth-grade teacher at Palo Verde Elementary in Palo Alto.

Although she stays away from the more sordid aspects of theelection, she has a lot of socially savvy kids — even at age 10 — who know to bring up topics in an inoffensive way and are eager to talk about them. Her approach has been to acknowledge their points, to stay away from details, and joke that those politicians who commit offending acts “maybe should have detention,” then change the subject.

But there have been times she’s truly struggled with what to say. In the primaries last year, she had a 10-year-old Latino student ask, “Why doesn’t Trump like me?”

“He was a very sweet and innocent young man,” she recalled. “And I just said, ‘Oh my gosh, everyone likes you.’ I don’t know what to say.‘ There’s no definitive answer to that. I can’t speak for Trump.”

“It’s a delicate balance, that makes us think about what we say,” said Megan Shelby, an eighth-grade U.S. history teacher at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School in Palo Alto. She and her fellow teachers have had to get together more frequently than in the past to discuss how best to teach the election, considering the political, ethnic and racial diversity of their students.

She’s struck sometimes by the irony of it all, she said.

“My students have shown more ethics, morality and understanding in their discussions than the candidates, at times,” she said. “In the eighth grade, they tend to really represent their family’s points of view. But at that age, they really are still open to changing viewpoints, if there is a better argument, and they are capable of coming together on issues.“

“Sometimes we wish we could see more of this from lawmakers, actually,” she said, a bit wistfully. “But these kids are going to lead the country someday. And I have great hope in the country because of the students we teach.”

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